The Shadow of the Mine

Coal and the End of Industrial Britain

Ray Hudson, Huw Beynon

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839761560
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday, the heroics and betrayals of the Miners' Strike, and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed.No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. Coal was central to the British economy, powering its factories and railways. It carried political weight, too. In the eighties the miners risked everything in a year-long strike against Thatcher's shutdowns. Their defeat doomed a way of life. The lingering sense of abandonment in former mining communities would be difficult to overstate. Yet recent electoral politics has revolved around the coalfield constituencies in Labour's Red Wall. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson draw on decades of research to chronicle these momentous changes through the words of the people who lived through them.This edition includes a new postscript on why Thatcher's war on the miners wasn't good for green politics. 'Excellent'
NEW STATESMAN 'Brilliant'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Enlightening'
GUARDIAN

CHAPTER ONE

Two Coalfields, Two Labour Traditions

We older ones can go back to a time when there were number 1, 2, 3 and 4 pits open in Maerdy, number 5 pit in Ferndale, number 9 pit in Tylorstown … there was a pit in every town. The hooter would sound at 11 o’clock and you would know that that was the end of the third lesson of the day. The pits then dominated the valleys. They dominated the community completely.

Terry Williams, Maerdy, 1999

For centuries the economies of South Wales and Durham were synonymous with coal mining. Durham was part of the Great Northern Coalfield, which from the sixteenth century produced coal on an increasing scale, reaching its high point at the beginning of the twentieth. Coal mining in South Wales began much later, developing very rapidly from the 1880s. Most of the coal was shipped from Cardiff and sold through its Coal Exchange, where the first ever million-pound cheque was signed and paid over for a coal shipment in 1904. Mining fed into the railways, into steel production, into engineering – and in the North East, into shipyards and the chemical industry as well – placing both regions at the centre of a single-fuel industrial economy.

Here, among the furnaces and coal mines, workers organised. Their unions were political, focusing attention on the need for proper state regulation of the industry. To this end the miners supported the Liberal Party against the Tories, and then provided the core support for the embryonic Labour Party. In 1900 Labour leader Keir Hardie was elected by the constituency of Merthyr Tydfil, becoming one of the Party’s first two MPs. In these places, the ability of workers to organise themselves effectively in the mines – and, above ground, to build complex political machines, networked across their coal-based economies – came to shape the mass social democratic politics that emerged in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.

Deep Legacies

Though they have many similarities, Durham and South Wales developed in quite different ways. Coal mining had its earliest expansion on the Great Northern – the ‘historic’ – Coalfield, with aristocratic landowners deeply involved in the trade (later diversifying into industrial production and finance). Pre-capitalist rural practices of tied labour were incorporated into the sector as it grew. Miners were tied to their employers through an annual bond, placing unfree labour at the heart of the area’s industrial economy. This continued until annulled by an Act of Parliament in 1872 under pressure from the newly formed Durham Miners’ Association (DMA). Miners were provided with houses free of charge as part of their wages, along with coal to heat their homes. The ‘fuel allowance’ became generally incorporated across the industry, but company housing was much more restricted and unusual in South Wales, where miners either rented privately or became homeowners through the formation of savings clubs. In Durham, therefore, coal mining enclosed the workers’ lives even more fully than it did in South Wales. There coal became dominated by modern firms that amalgamated and developed into large multi-entity combines – allowing access to social institutions beyond the industry.¹

Geology created other differences between the areas. In Durham, the coal seams to the west lay relatively near to the surface, while those to the east are concealed under a deep layer of the Magnesian limestone and extend beyond the coast under the sea. As a consequence, deep mining began in the west of the county and moved eastward as techniques improved, leaving redundant mines in its wake. In South Wales, the coal measures lie in an oval-shaped formation with sharply incised river valleys cutting across them from north to south, often exposing seams to drift mines, with the shafts of the deep mines driven into the valley floors. Unlike in Durham, there was no systematic spatial shift in the locus of coal production; rather, many centres emerged at around the same time, in each of the twenty valleys that stretch from the Ebbw Fach in the east, across to the Taff, Cynon and Rhondda in the central coalfield, and then to Neath and the Loughor valley of the western anthracite belt.

Geology also connects the two coalfields, however. Contrary to popular belief, coal is not a homogeneous material. Produced through powerful geological processes, its makeup varies, and this is expressed as a rank order, from one (anthracite, the most valuable) to nine (lignite, the least). Durham and South Wales produced some of the highest-ranked coals in the world. The coals of Durham belonged to the third and fourth ranks, which made them eminently suitable for making coke; the same was true of the coals of the eastern valleys of South Wales. Superior 201 coals were found in the central valleys of Glamorgan: the Taff, Cynon and Rhondda. Referred to as ‘dry steam’, these coals are exceptional in their capacity to burn cleanly without smoke and were in great demand, particularly for powering the boilers of steam-driven naval ships. Further to the west was an anthracite belt of 101 coals, made of pure carbon and hard as diamonds: producing great heat with little smoke, they were a popular source of domestic heating and also drove the locomotives of the Great Western Railway, enhancing their reputation for speed and cleanliness. As a consequence, and in their different ways, Durham and South Wales became regions that propelled the development of British industrial capitalism.

Yet the coals, valuable as they were, were often located in very thin seams and could be difficult to extract. Miners endured a harsh regime of heavy physical labour in often perilous conditions. The men working the Garw seam in South Wales and the Victoria and Brockwell in West Durham did so with a pick and shovel while lying on their sides, often in water. The high methane content of these coals made them prone to explosion, and there was extensive loss of life through innumerable ‘disasters’. One occurred at the West Stanley colliery in 1909, when 168 men and boys were killed. Another, even more calamitous, took the lives of 439 miners at the Universal colliery in Senghenydd four years later. Events like these, focusing attention on the need for adequate ventilation of the mines and full safety procedures, help explain the political nature of mining trade unionism and its concern with state regulation of the industry.

The Miners, United?

Focused locally on the branch, or ‘lodge’, the trade union was the main organising point within a mining village, dealing with industrial, social and political issues. Trade unionism took on particular regional characteristics in Britain’s coalfields. The Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) was established in 1869, its members united in their opposition to the annual bond. This, together with the experience of disharmony and failure in the past, influenced the creation of a highly centralised county union – something that would remain a principal aspect of its character. In contrast, the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF) was founded much later, out of a number of independent local unions, after the failed ‘six month strike’ in 1898. Local autonomy was written into the constitution, and repeated attempts to alter the rules in favour of greater centralisation foundered.

The significance of these differences in structure can be seen in the methods used to elect full-time officials. In both areas there were normally five such officeholders: the president, general secretary and three others, termed agents. In Durham, elections were decided by lodge vote rather than individual ballot, with each lodge being allocated a quota of votes (up to six) dependent on the number of members (up to 700). This method seriously disadvantaged the more militant lodges of the large east-coast collieries that employed up to 3,000 miners. Furthermore, the all-important positions of president and general secretary never went to ballot. In Durham, all elections were for the position of agent, the successful candidate moving up the hierarchy over time as people retired. This was justified as a way of ensuring that the most senior positions were occupied by men who had had an extended induction into all the activities and commitments of the union. It also provided a safety valve for the organisation, preventing newcomers from making radical changes.

Other differences between the regions stemmed from the ways in which the work in the mine was organised. In Durham, miners at a young age commenced underground as putters, involved in the haulage of coal from the faces to the shaft.² In time they progressed to being hewers, working in pairs of marras (mates) on two short shifts of seven hours to dig out the coal, while the putters worked on one longer shift of ten or eleven hours. This occupational progression, with the mature men in the best-paid jobs, led to the DMA being seen as ‘the hewers’ union’ and contributed to the skilled men (at that time the blacksmiths, boilersmiths, masons, horseshoers and their various apprentices and labourers) breaking away to form their own union, the Durham Colliery Mechanics’ Association.³ Finally, the miners in Durham retained customary practices, significantly in relation to the allocation of workplaces, where a lottery system known as cavilling, a practice that dated back to the nineteenth century, was retained into the contemporary period.⁴

The arrangements in South Wales offered a contrast. There was no cavilling, and the cutting and hauling of coal were arranged as separate modes of progression for young miners. As a consequence the face workers had a less powerful presence than in Durham, and all grades worked the same shift patterns. It was found that in 1906, hewers in Durham worked an average shift of six hours and forty-nine minutes, while in South Wales the colliers in Monmouthshire worked for nine hours and fifty-seven minutes. Wages differed too, both between the regions and within each and, given the use of piece rates, earnings were affected by geology and the problem of working in ‘abnormal places’ (which were not actually uncommon in either area).

Variations in working conditions and remuneration were tempered to some extent in Durham through cavilling (the law of chance) and conciliation, which allowed reference to wages within the range of a ‘county average’. Nevertheless, these were the sorts of issues that the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, loosely coordinating the several district coalfield unions, aimed to resolve through national agreements. Durham’s hewers were reluctant to join the MFGB. When they finally did, in 1907, the Great Northern stood alongside South Wales as a numerically dominant Area in the campaign for an eight-hour day and a minimum wage.⁵

The density of miners and manual workers in the coalfield districts meant that, with the advent of a universal parliamentary franchise, these areas were in a powerful position in national elections. Both the DMA and the SWMF were effective in influencing the selection of candidates and in organising their support, initially for the Liberal Party, with officials including William Abraham and John Wilson themselves sitting in Parliament as Lib–Lab members alongside some of the coal owners. In Durham over many decades, the presumption of a necessary unity of interest between owner and miner had produced an elaborate system of conciliation and compromise which Wilson defended in his resistance to joining the MFGB. He was even more staunch in his opposition to the fledging Labour Party, so that while Abraham prudently took the Labour whip in 1910, Wilson never did. In his words:

I went into the House as a thorough believer in and supporter of Mr Gladstone and the Liberal Party in general politics. From that I have never swerved. That is my political creed now [1909] and without a shadow of doubt it will remain.⁶

But his time had passed, and through skilful campaigning, the group of Independent Labour Party (ILP) activists was set to replace him. In the general election of 1918, the MFGB put forward a total of fifty-one candidates, of whom twenty-four were elected: two in Durham and five in South Wales. The leading socialist thinker and Oxford academic G. D. H. Cole, a strong supporter of guild socialism, saw this as evidence that Labour was ‘overwhelmingly a trade union party’, adding that ‘half of the trade union representation was drawn from a single union’.⁷ Across both coalfields Conservative candidates – coal owners or those allied closely with them – were defeated by checkweighmen and agents from the miners’ unions. This pattern was to continue, emphasising the political nature of the miners’ trade union, which saw industrial class struggle played out through parliamentary processes.

Coal Mining and Domestic Labour

Despite the differences in shift patterns and working arrangements between the coalminers of Durham and South Wales, they shared the reality of a job that was dirty, arduous and dangerous. It was widely understood that given the option of alternative employment, men would not choose to go down the mine. This, together with the remoteness of many of the mining locations, helps to explain how mining villages in both areas became separated from other forms of work and influences. In Durham, where mining had gestated over centuries, the labour force had developed through generations. The employers’ language reflected this pattern, with talk of ‘mining stock’ and their own ‘breed’ of pitmen, sometimes expanded through ‘imports’ from their other landed estates.⁸

In South Wales, where coal production grew apace, employers had to recruit widely, resulting in a workforce of migrants drawn from the Welsh countryside, and later from the Welsh borders and the West Country. At the turn of the century there was a large influx of mine workers from Spain.⁹ Such patterns of recruitment were not unusual and can be seen in the reconstruction of the coal mines in Belgium after 1945 and also across the history of gold and coal mining in South Africa. In each of these cases, however, the employers found it necessary to provide dormitory facilities to accommodate and feed the miners, with spaces to wash and to clean their clothing. In South Wales, as in Durham, th...